WHAT IF FREE, RENEWABLE COOKING GAS WAS AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE IN NEED?
Ten years ago, while traveling in Africa, I saw women returning from the forest carrying wood for cooking. I later discovered that cooking this way is creating major problems. One hour of cooking on open fire is equal to smoking 400 cigarettes, which causes the death of four million women and children every year. Today there are three billion people who still cook on an open fire. I decided I must do something about it, which led to starting HomeBiogas.
HomeBiogas is a household system that turns organic waste like food leftovers, animal manure, and human waste, into clean cooking gas and liquid fertilizer. From only a few kilos of waste it can provide three to six hours of cooking per day – improving lives and benefitting the environment.
FUNDING WOULD ALLOW US TO…
Funding would help our vision of making HomeBiogas affordable and accessible to all. Until recently, our company worked with a sales model. Now we are transforming to a service model to make our product more affordable. A family can pay $30 for charcoal each month. If they want to buy HomeBiogas, they must pay $400 upfront which can be difficult to do. On a service model they can pay $20 dollars per month and after 20 months they will own the product outright.
We have already begun the service model in India and Kenya, but our distributors are doing payment collection door-to-door. With the funding support we will continue the development of a smart gas valve so that the distributor can take incremental payments through mobile phones. This would mean that the customer doesn’t have to make a large up-front payment and can receive maintenance and customer service over time.
With each household system, 730 kg of waste is avoided, and six tonnes of CO2 emissions are prevented. To date, we have sold over 9,000 systems in 107 countries, which projects how much wider of an impact we can make – this is our time to scale and reach all populations in need.
